02 October 19
FOCUS: There's Another Whistleblower Complaint. It's About Trump's Tax Returns.
Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Rampell writes: "This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service's audit of the president."
Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Rampell writes: "This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service's audit of the president."
EXCERPT:
In defiance of a half-century norm, Trump has kept his tax returns secret.
We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad.
Maybe these documents would reveal something embarrassing but not criminal (e.g., the relatively puny size of his fortune). Maybe they’d reveal that some of his financial dealings are legally dubious or even fraudulent, which would be consistent with past Trump-family tax behavior.
Most significantly, they might reveal that Trump has been profiting off the presidency. Among the relevant conflict-of-interest questions that Trump’s taxes could answer: whom he gets money from, whom he owes money to (and on what terms) or how his 2017 tax overhaul enriched him personally.
Not that you’d know it from the administration’s stonewalling, but Congress actually has unambiguous authority to get Trump’s returns. In fact, it has had the authority to get any federal tax return, no questions asked, for nearly a century. Under a 1924 law, Treasury “shall furnish” any tax document requested by the House Ways and Means or Senate Finance Committee chairs.
That’s exactly what the House Ways and Means chairman, Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), did in the spring. The statute doesn’t require him to state any legislative purpose for his request, but he provided one anyway: He said that committee needed to make sure the IRS, which it oversees, is properly conducting its annual audit of the president and vice president, as the IRS manual has required post-Watergate.
There is historical precedent for worrying about how rigorously the IRS might be auditing its own boss. In the early 1970s, the agency commended then- President Richard M. Nixon on his supposedly pristine tax filings, even though he owed about a half-million dollars in unpaid taxes and interest.
Since then, presidents have voluntarily released their tax returns. So Congress didn’t really need to worry much about whether the IRS was going easy on the president.
“The concern about the IRS’s audit is almost minimal or nonexistent if tax returns are public, because there are effectively a million auditors,” says George K. Yin, University of Virginia School of Law professor emeritus and former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. “The public can see if there’s any funny business going on.”
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